Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

A selective list of online literary criticism and analysis for the nineteenth-century English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with links to reliable biographical and introductory material and signed, peer-reviewed, and scholarly literary criticism.

Miall, David S.
"Coleridge 'Frost at Midnight.'" Background to the poem; First version of the poem, 1798; Structure and style; Critical commentaries; Psychology of attachment, loss, and fantasy; Further reading on "Frost at Midnight." Professor's Miall's web site.

Perry, Seamus.
"Samuel Taylor Coleridge."Literary Encyclopedia. An introduction to Coleridge, from a database that provides signed literary criticism by experts in their field, and is available to individuals for a reasonably-priced subscription [subscription service].

Hough, Barry; Howard Davis. Coleridge's Laws: A Study of Coleridge in Malta (Open Book Publishers 2011). Using a new publishing model, this complete book is available open access through Google. Says the publisher's blurb: "Samuel Taylor Coleridge is best known as a great poet and literary theorist, but for one, quite short, period of his life he held real political power - acting as Public Secretary to the British Civil Commissioner in Malta in 1805. This was a formative experience for Coleridge which he later identified as being one of the most instructive in his entire life. In this volume, Barry Hough and Howard Davis show how Coleridge's actions whilst in a position of power differ markedly from the idealism he had advocated before taking office - shedding new light on Coleridge's sense of political and legal morality."

Milnes, Tim. "Through the Looking-Glass: Coleridge and Post-Kantian Philosophy."Comparative Literature (1999) [and Immanuel Kant; David Hume]. Milnes contends that "while in Germany the role of the professional philosopher had been energized by the task of working through the implications of Kant's 'Copernican revolution,' in England the withering of the philosophical appetite after Hume's dismantling of knowledge meant that the task of constructing an ideology of a post-revolutionary culture, whether social or metaphysical, fell largely to poets, essayists and journalists" [first page of article only].

Thomas, Sophie. "Seeing Things ("as They Are"): Coleridge, Schiller, and the Play of Semblance." Thomas discusses Coleridge's play Remorse, nothing that although Coleridge is not usually studied as either a playwright or theorist of the drama, "Coleridge did make serious attempts to write plays, largely, it seems, in response to the abysmal state of English drama in the 1790s." Studies in Romanticism 43 (2004) [subscription service].

Romanticism on the Net. Ed. Michael Eberle-Sinatra. An international, peer-reviewed electronic journal devoted to British Romantic studies, an impressive scholarly enterprise that has been making essays freely available since 1996.

"A Romantic Natural History." Ed. Ashton Nichols. The relationships between literary works and natural history in the century before Darwin, with articles on Coleridge and other Romantics.

Tetreault, Ronald and Bruce Graver. The Lyrical Ballads Bicenterary Project, 1998. Ed. Ronald Tetreault and Bruce Graver. Electronic texts from the books, which have been transcribed and encoded using sgml, supplemented with images of the printed pages of the first edition.

Book Reviews

Brewer, Kenneth Larry. A review of Coleridge's Later Poetry by Morton D. Paley; and of Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity: 1774-1830, by Andrea K. Henderson. Romanticism on the Net.